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- Jul 27, 2012
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- Lenovo S30 4351 "Socrates" Rev. 2.0 Product Name: 43518G3
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- Xeon E5-1650
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- EVGA GTX1050ti
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As flash drives are getting bigger and cheaper all the time, i picked up a 16GB USB thumb drive for $8 the other day. And then a wicked thought occurred to me; I have install/Live disks for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux and I use all of the above with some regularity. I prefer to use USB to install or live boot an OS whenever possible for obvious reasons. Wouldn't it be great if I could have all those tools available on a single USB?
Well, long story short, I accomplished just that. I now have a 16GB flash drive that can be used to install Windows 7, Kubuntu 12.04 and OSX Lion. All in all the process is fairly simple, it just took me quite a bit of trial and error to get it to work.
It's worth noting that you need an existing Unibeast flash drive in order to accomplish this because in order for this to work you need to create the Windows installer first, which has to be on the first partition and can not be moved or cloned to another drive or it will fail to boot. Linux and OSX have no such limitations though.
First thing's first:
Step 1: Starting with a Flash Drive of sufficient size (16GB minimum) partition the drive as MBR with three partitions. The first being a 5GB NTFS partition for the Windows 7 installer. The second being an 8GB HFS+ partition and the third being a FAT32 partition using the rest of the space.
Step 2: Create the Windows 7 USB installer by following my directions from my blog. Skip the part about partitioning since we just did that in OSX using Disk Utility
WTFM!: How to create a Windows 7 USB installer – WITH PICTURES!
Step 3: Using disk utility, clone your existing Unibeast USB to the HFS+ partition on the 16GB thumb drive. Then run Unibeast on the newly cloned Unibeast partition, making sure to select the Apple Store USB option (and make sure you don't have that USB plugged in when you do this, we are only trying to install Chimera to the new USB drive and this is the easiest method)
Step 4: (and this is the step that befuddled me the most, surprising since Linux should technically be the EASIEST to create a live USB). The magic here turned out to be using Unetbootin. See, Chimera will happily boot a Linux partition provided that there is a GRUB boot loader installed TO THAT PARTITION. When you create a LiveUSB it installs GRUB, but to the disk's MBR, so you are faced with one of two situations, either Chimera does not see the Linux partition, or GRUB overwrites Chimera and you lose the ability to install any other operating system using this USB. As it would turn out, you have to use Chimera for this particular setup because the version of GRUB that comes with Unetbootin (I think it's a modified version of NeoGRUB) can't be configured to chainload the OSX or Windows installers. At least not that I was able to figure out.
So like I said, just use Unetbootin to create the Linux installer of your choice (I used Kubuntu 12.04) on the last partition. Now, before you go any further here you will need to set the boot flag back to the OSX partition or else it will boot into the Linux installer only. This can be easily accomplished using GPartEd on any Linux distro.
So... to recap, this is a fairly complex setup and you will require a working Windows 7, OSX and Linux install to create it. But in the end, you will have a Swiss Army Knife Operating System install disk! I think the only thing that would make it any more useful would be to throw a copy of BackTrack and Hiren's Live Windows XP.
Well, long story short, I accomplished just that. I now have a 16GB flash drive that can be used to install Windows 7, Kubuntu 12.04 and OSX Lion. All in all the process is fairly simple, it just took me quite a bit of trial and error to get it to work.
It's worth noting that you need an existing Unibeast flash drive in order to accomplish this because in order for this to work you need to create the Windows installer first, which has to be on the first partition and can not be moved or cloned to another drive or it will fail to boot. Linux and OSX have no such limitations though.
First thing's first:
Step 1: Starting with a Flash Drive of sufficient size (16GB minimum) partition the drive as MBR with three partitions. The first being a 5GB NTFS partition for the Windows 7 installer. The second being an 8GB HFS+ partition and the third being a FAT32 partition using the rest of the space.
Step 2: Create the Windows 7 USB installer by following my directions from my blog. Skip the part about partitioning since we just did that in OSX using Disk Utility
WTFM!: How to create a Windows 7 USB installer – WITH PICTURES!
Step 3: Using disk utility, clone your existing Unibeast USB to the HFS+ partition on the 16GB thumb drive. Then run Unibeast on the newly cloned Unibeast partition, making sure to select the Apple Store USB option (and make sure you don't have that USB plugged in when you do this, we are only trying to install Chimera to the new USB drive and this is the easiest method)
Step 4: (and this is the step that befuddled me the most, surprising since Linux should technically be the EASIEST to create a live USB). The magic here turned out to be using Unetbootin. See, Chimera will happily boot a Linux partition provided that there is a GRUB boot loader installed TO THAT PARTITION. When you create a LiveUSB it installs GRUB, but to the disk's MBR, so you are faced with one of two situations, either Chimera does not see the Linux partition, or GRUB overwrites Chimera and you lose the ability to install any other operating system using this USB. As it would turn out, you have to use Chimera for this particular setup because the version of GRUB that comes with Unetbootin (I think it's a modified version of NeoGRUB) can't be configured to chainload the OSX or Windows installers. At least not that I was able to figure out.
So like I said, just use Unetbootin to create the Linux installer of your choice (I used Kubuntu 12.04) on the last partition. Now, before you go any further here you will need to set the boot flag back to the OSX partition or else it will boot into the Linux installer only. This can be easily accomplished using GPartEd on any Linux distro.
So... to recap, this is a fairly complex setup and you will require a working Windows 7, OSX and Linux install to create it. But in the end, you will have a Swiss Army Knife Operating System install disk! I think the only thing that would make it any more useful would be to throw a copy of BackTrack and Hiren's Live Windows XP.
]. Therefore, before I started, I created two partitions and restored, using Unibeast, with Mountain Lion and Lion on my existing Lion installation.